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Modern machine learning models are prone to over-reliance on spurious correlations, which can often lead to poor performance on minority groups. In this paper, we identify surprising and nuanced behavior of finetuned models on worst-group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Tyler LaBonte , John C. Hill , Xinchen Zhang , Vidya Muthukumar , Abhishek Kumar

Deep learning models often achieve high performance by inadvertently learning spurious correlations between targets and non-essential features. For example, an image classifier may identify an object via its background that spuriously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Guangtao Zheng , Wenqian Ye , Aidong Zhang

Multi-annotator learning (MAL) aims to model annotator-specific labeling patterns. However, existing methods face a critical challenge: they simply skip updating annotator-specific model parameters when encountering missing labels, i.e., a…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Liyun Zhang , Zheng Lian , Hong Liu , Takanori Takebe , Yuta Nakashima

Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) is fragile in scenarios with insufficient labeled samples. A vanilla extension of ERM to unlabeled samples is Entropy Minimization (EntMin), which employs the soft-labels of unlabeled samples to guide their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Yulong Zhang , Yuan Yao , Shuhao Chen , Pengrong Jin , Yu Zhang , Jian Jin , Jiangang Lu

Out-of-distribution (OOD) prediction is often approached by restricting models to causal or invariant covariates, avoiding non-causal spurious associations that may be unstable across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-06 Shuozhi Zuo , Yixin Wang

While neural networks have shown remarkable success on classification tasks in terms of average-case performance, they often fail to perform well on certain groups of the data. Such group information may be expensive to obtain; thus, recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Nimit S. Sohoni , Maziar Sanjabi , Nicolas Ballas , Aditya Grover , Shaoliang Nie , Hamed Firooz , Christopher Ré

Despite the rapid development of machine learning algorithms for domain generalization (DG), there is no clear empirical evidence that the existing DG algorithms outperform the classic empirical risk minimization (ERM) across standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Rui Qiao , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

We propose self-adaptive training---a new training algorithm that dynamically corrects problematic training labels by model predictions without incurring extra computational cost---to improve generalization of deep learning for potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Lang Huang , Chao Zhang , Hongyang Zhang

We study the problem of invariant learning when the environment labels are unknown. We focus on the invariant representation notion when the Bayes optimal conditional label distribution is the same across different environments. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Aayush Mishra , Anqi Liu

Reinforcement learning has become the central approach for language models (LMs) to learn from environmental reward or feedback. In practice, the environmental feedback is usually sparse and delayed. Learning from such signals is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Taiwei Shi , Sihao Chen , Bowen Jiang , Linxin Song , Longqi Yang , Jieyu Zhao

Given a collection of feature maps indexed by a set $\mathcal{T}$, we study the performance of empirical risk minimization (ERM) on regression problems with square loss over the union of the linear classes induced by these feature maps.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-20 Ayoub El Hanchi , Chris J. Maddison , Murat A. Erdogdu

Despite empirical risk minimization (ERM) is widely applied in the machine learning community, its performance is limited on data with spurious correlation or subpopulation that is introduced by hidden attributes. Existing literature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Hongyu Shen , Zhizhen Zhao

Structured prediction requires models to generate ontology-constrained labels, grounded evidence, and valid structure under ambiguity, label skew, and heterogeneous group difficulty. We present a two-part framework for controllable…

In the context of noisy partial label learning (NPLL), each training sample is associated with a set of candidate labels annotated by multiple noisy annotators. With the emergence of high-performance pre-trained vision-language models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Qian-Wei Wang , Yaguang Song , Shu-Tao Xia

The existence of spurious correlations such as image backgrounds in the training environment can make empirical risk minimization (ERM) perform badly in the test environment. To address this problem, Kirichenko et al. (2022) empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Haotian Ye , James Zou , Linjun Zhang

Models trained via empirical risk minimization (ERM) are known to rely on spurious correlations between labels and task-independent input features, resulting in poor generalization to distributional shifts. Group distributionally robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-12 Bhargavi Paranjape , Pradeep Dasigi , Vivek Srikumar , Luke Zettlemoyer , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is the workhorse of machine learning, whether for classification and regression or for off-policy policy learning, but its model-agnostic guarantees can fail when we use adaptively collected data, such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-04 Aurélien Bibaut , Antoine Chambaz , Maria Dimakopoulou , Nathan Kallus , Mark van der Laan

Acquiring and training on large-scale labeled data can be impractical due to cost constraints. Additionally, the use of small training datasets can result in considerable variability in model outcomes, overfitting, and learning of spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jiashu Tao , Reza Shokri

Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models such as BERT improve robustness to spurious correlations in the dataset. Intrigued by these results, we find that the key to their success is generalization from a small amount of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Lifu Tu , Garima Lalwani , Spandana Gella , He He

Neural NLP models tend to rely on spurious correlations between labels and input features to perform their tasks. Minority examples, i.e., examples that contradict the spurious correlations present in the majority of data points, have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh , Soroush Mehri , Remi Tachet , T. J. Hazen , Alessandro Sordoni